Gods of the Greataway

by Coney, Michael G.

  Many times a vision of Ana would jiggle in the mind of a village man as he drank before his hut, the day’s work done. He would wipe his mouth with the back of his hand and, grinning furtively, would make his way down the road to the little store with the bright cloths hanging outside. His mind would be glowing with a vision of the mature and delectable Ana, and what he was going to do with her. He would stop outside the store, finger the cloths, and chip at the sandstone with his fingernail while he peered inside, wondering how best to declare his intentions. The evening sun would slant across the entrance, so he couldn’t see much, but his imagination would fill in the shadows. And the wind, rustling among the grasses that hung above the cave entrance, would be the rustlings of her clothes. Then, blinking, he would enter.

  Her loom would be working; that was for sure. The warp would be stretched across the frame — Ana did that herself, working quickly with strong fingers — and the two tiny animals, the sapas, would be scurrying to and fro, shuttling the weft. The sapas were one of the wonders of Ana’s cave. The villagers had never seen useful (in the human sense) rodents before, and they couldn’t understand how Ana had trained the little animals to carry out this intricate task. They themselves had tried, with cavies, and the cavies had simply sat and eaten the warp.

  The sapas weren’t trained, of course. It was in their nature to weave. They were a relic of a bygone age, when man had been in partnership in the stars with the kikihuahuas, who worked together with nature and the creatures around them. How Ana had come by the sapas is not recorded, but she had bred them carefully down the ages.

  Then there would be the spices and the curios and the dried fruits and fish; shelf upon shelf of goods that Ana bartered with the villagers and anyone else who might be passing. Pu’este had no currency, and barter was the rule. Ana was so experienced — and so honest — that she was often called upon to arbitrate in village transactions.

  At the very back of the cave was a dark, damp hole that was rumored to be a Life Cave, because Ana had never taken shelter with the other villagers when the snake clouds threatened.

  So — Ana the Wise: a mysterious woman of boundless experience and knowledge and beauty, who lived alone in her cave beside the road and only occasionally ventured afield, who was desired by every man in Pu’este — and who had been possessed by none.

  The villager would enter, blinking, seeing the outline of Ana and her dark hair and breasts, and soon his eyes would become accustomed to the gloom.

  “Can I help you?” she would say, in that husky voice.

  “I … I …”

  “Come over here, and I’ll do what I can.”

  A counter would separate them, a balk of hewn driftwood resting on two stumps. He would see Ana leaning on it, her elbows against the wood, her face cupped in her hands, her eyes looking up at him.

  Her eyes …

  They looked up at him like creatures apart, twins of incredible beauty who knew his every wish. Her face was simply a frame for those eyes; it provided them with a place to live and a window to look out of. He forgot her face and with it her body. He communicated with the eyes of Ana. He told them his longing, his needs.

  They invited him into their home.

  He dwelt there for an unknown time: Time had no meaning in the home of Ana’s eyes. It was a warm place where everything happened, everything good. No man ever spoke of it, afterward. It was a secret place, and to tell about it would spoil the delight. It was a place where a tired man rested and where an angry man found peace and, if they but knew it, where a sick man was healed. Men entered the home of Ana’s eyes with lust in their minds, and they came out gently happy. They could not say why they were happy, but the glow would stay with them all the way back to the village. And only when they were among their fellow men, among the nudges and grins and innuendo, would they grin and wink, too, and the sublime home would be forgotten, and they would convince themselves that they had got what they went for. As, in fact, they had.

  Ana would blink, and the spell would be broken.

  “Thank you,” the villager would say, and prepare to leave.

  Ana would give him a little bag of dried fruit or a pinch of some spice, as a reason for having come.

  THE SMALL RAINBOW

  It was late afternoon when Dad Ose arrived outside Ana’s store. She was beginning to gather in her wares, unpinning a row of children’s dresses from a line strung between two ancient trees. Dad Ose would have found it difficult to explain why he had come to see her, but it had something to do with Manuel’s having mentioned her name, and a lot to do with a curious mood of restlessness and uncertainty that had come over him. He sensed that big events were afoot. Something was happening that was much more important than the wretched Horse Day celebrations, and he wanted to be a part of it. So he had come to see Ana, who knew everything, and was understanding and beautiful. Did he need any other reason?

  She looked at him, reaching up for a tiny dress.

  He said quickly, hoping she hadn’t seen him looking at her body, “Manuel’s back.”

  “That’s good. He’s the only one who can keep the Quicklies in order.” Ana smiled her wonderful smile, and Dad Ose tried to concentrate on what she was saying. “They’ve been bothersome recently. I think they’re at war again. They leave the beach when they’re unhappy, you know. They come up the road and take things from the store. I can’t stop them. One minute a sapa cloth is hanging there, the next minute, poof! it’s gone.” And she smiled again, as though to say the Quicklies were no problem really, in the greater scheme of things.

  “Always fighting,” Dad Ose grumbled.

  “No more than Humanity, really. Cultures and factions come and go so fast with the Quicklies. We only notice their bad times. Manuel will set them right.”

  “I hope so.” Dad Ose’s concern was dogmatic. It was wrong that creatures should fight, particularly humanoids. They should live together in harmony, one with God. It was also rather annoying that Manuel should have more influence over the Quicklies than he, a priest. It was that toy of Manuel’s, that machine he called a Simulator. It seemed to fascinate the Quicklies and to calm them.

  Later he and Ana walked together to the beach. The evening was drawing on, and she expected no more customers. The weather was fine and the stars were beginning to wink from behind a scattering of high horse clouds.

  Manuel was sitting on the beach before the Simulator, which showed a swirling, incomplete mind-painting. He could not concentrate; at their approach he looked up and took off the helmet.

  He said, “Do you know I’ve seen Quicklies cry? They cried at a mind-painting I once did, and I saw the tears. I saw the tears — do you know what that means, Dad Ose? It’s the same thing as my crying for a year and never wiping the tears away.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “They had a big fight earlier. A battle.” He picked up a curious object from the beach, a triangle of straight sticks, each about a hand’s length, joined with thongs, with other thongs running crosswise like harp strings. It was insubstantial and tingled in his hand. “They left a lot of dead, and these things. I think they’re weapons. The tide’s covered most of it up, now.”

  “Can’t you stop them? They’ve been bothering Ana.” Dad Ose’s voice was stern, as though it were Manuel’s fault.

  “It’s nothing, really,” said Ana. She was watching a nearby patch of sand that seemed to be glowing.

  “I can’t seem to get them interested in the Simulator anymore. And …” he hesitated. “And I’m not so interested myself, now. My painting … I know it’s not very good.” He wanted to explain. He would have liked to explain to Ana — but Dad Ose was there. He had evoked his original painting several times — Belinda: the Storm Girl — but it didn’t seem to have the same meaning anymore. So he’d been fiddling with it, unsuccessfully. He felt like kicking in the front of the Simulator.

  Ana said carefully, “Drop in at my place sometime, Manuel.”


  “There’s something funny on the sand,” said Dad Ose.

  And a group of Quicklies jittered by. “Ya-heeee!” They darted to and fro, and Manuel felt a quick pluck at his clothing; but no one was there. Fast blurs flitted through the evening shadows and, for an instant, a small, inert figure lay nearby, dying fast before disappearing. The Quicklies were one of the coast’s mysteries. Their lifespan was measured in days — and very few days, at that. In later millennia, the minstrels would speculate that the Quicklies were one of the results of the war with the Red Planet; but whether they were victims of the frightful Weapon, or a human experiment created to counteract it, was never clear. Some learned minds held that they were a perfectly normal, though primitive, tribe living on an adjacent happen-track with a different frame of duration, sometimes impinging on normal Earth time. Another group suggested they were the offspring of a terrifying race of creatures known as the Bale Wolves.

  The village mothers used them as a threat:

  Lazy boy, lazy boy, what a surprise!

  Little blind Quicklies are stealing your eyes!

  So ran a local ditty.

  That evening they were busier than usual. Occasionally they stood before Manuel and he would catch a glimpse of an inquisitive chimplike face, eyes a blur of blinking; then they would be gone. A violent turmoil took place in the shallows and a few bodies rocked in the waves for a second before flickering out.

  “They don’t remember me,” said Manuel. “They used to be more friendly than this.” His voice was sad. His absence from Pu’este had cost him a lot.

  “These are many generations removed from the ones you used to know,” Ana reminded him. “And your influence has faded with time. I think … You used to be a kind of god to them — you know that? You taught them love, with your Simulator. They’d never known love before, and for a while it calmed them. They were docile for many days after you left. But then …” She shrugged, and her breasts rose under the sapa cloth. “Now, they’re at war.”

  Indeed, the situation seemed to be worsening. Two opposing mobs had become evident, hordes of skittering shadows at either end of the beach. A major conflict was about to take place. Meanwhile, one Quickly was busy nearby on a lone project. He darted to and fro, occasionally sitting. A shapeless, shifting mount of some unknown material rose in front of him, and he seemed to be working on it.

  “Me, a god?” said Manuel wonderingly.

  “Love …” muttered Dad Ose. He was shocked. Love was something that people didn’t talk about. Love was an artificial extension of sex that had — so legend had it — been the downfall of the First Variety of Man. Ana was known to be outspoken, but this was going too far.

  “Have you ever wondered just what the Quicklies are?” asked Ana.

  “They’re God’s creatures,” replied Dad Ose shortly.

  “Human or animal?”

  “Animal, of course.”

  “Maybe we’d understand the Quicklies better if we thought that point through,” said Ana.

  Manuel was watching the mound grow into a small tower. “I think it makes no difference,” he said. The busy Quickly kept flitting across to him, looking at him, darting away. Now the two armies were quieter and a number of Quicklies were clearly visible, sitting down. Others came to view the tower for a brief instant before rejoining their factions. The waves had stilled. The little tower leaned to the north and glowed with pale light, becoming brighter as evening deepened. It was about a meter high, shaped like a child’s crude sandcastle, but not made from sand. Rather, it was built from one of those unidentifiable substances that the Quicklies invented from time to time and then forgot. The Quickly was now building another tower close to the first. Another Quickly, viewing the construction, dropped suddenly dead. The armies waited.

  Two huge misshapen figures were walking down the beach toward them, coming from the north.

  The three people, who would soon be joined by two more, stood there in the darkening evening, each busy with his own thoughts. Manuel, the dreaming youth, thought of romance and, strangely, a face he’d never seen and a name he’d never heard. He’d dreamed about this face last night. At first it had been Belinda; then it was a different face, dark where Belinda was fair, with brown eyes where Belinda’s were blue.

  “Who are you?” he’d asked.

  And she’d grinned, elfin, mischievous, and said, “Elizabeth.”

  The clarity of this vision had remained with him all day.

  Dad Ose was struggling to understand love and the Quicklies, sick at his own ignorance. It wouldn’t have mattered if nobody else had been able to understand the world around them; that was the will of God. But somehow he felt other people understood more than he. Even Manuel seemed to sense dimensions to existence that he, Dad Ose, would never know. And all that traveling recently, of which he would say nothing …

  And Ana, now. Little better than a whore, so men said — yet she made him feel small; she seemed possessed of a wisdom far beyond his ken …

  Ana’s own thoughts during those moments are not known.

  Three people, then, watching the Quicklies preparing for war while one lone Quickly built twin towers that glowed in the dark. Thinking there was nothing unusual in what they saw. The Quicklies were the Quicklies, and they often did strange things.

  The little towers leaned toward each other. Each was slightly bowed, so that if they met — and it looked as though they soon might — they would form a curved arch. The base of each tower spread into a pedestal, but the towers themselves were of consistent diameter, and smooth. There was a tension in them. They seemed to be almost trying to meet, straining toward each other. The gap between them was less than half a meter. The glow was brighter now, and refracting. Colors showed, in hazy stripes — red, orange, yellow … Manuel thought: Yes …

  The Quickly was building a miniature rainbow.

  He was sitting beside it now, utterly motionless, so that every detail of his body showed as clearly as in death. In his short lifetime — he was aging visibly now — he had progressed from building manually, with sand and other materials, to building by mental power alone. And the towers had become transformed from a solid construction to a rainbow of beauty and light.

  But it was not quite finished.

  The rainbow hummed as the two ends crept toward each other, a musical hum like a chime of many chords, harmonizing in a way not found in man’s music. The Quickly aged, sitting there in the glow of his own creation, a sad little chimpanzee with wise eyes. Others came to look and to bring him food. Many died, as though seeing the rainbow was the final justification of their existence.

  The opposing armies waited. Soldiers died, recruits joined up.

  “But $$$ what is it?” asked Dad Ose.

  Ana knew. She looked at him and smiled, the way a young mother smiles at her child. She looked at him and saw beyond the wrinkled skin and barrel chest. She saw him as the Quicklies saw him, and she knew he would never believe what they were doing. So she said nothing.

  So rapt were the three that when the other two finally arrived they were barely acknowledged. The Girl and Zozula nodded at Manuel, Ana and Dad Ose, then they, too, turned their attention to the almost-rainbow. It was small, the thing they watched, just a bright arch a little over a meter high on a beach under the stars, but it absorbed all their senses and they spoke no more.

  The Quickly was very old. His shoulders were bowed, his eyes closed, his tiny fists clenched. Companions sat with him now, almost as motionless as he, supporting him and willing him to continue.

  The rainbow had little more than a centimeter to go, and little sparks flashed where the twin columns were beginning to join. It affected senses other than vision, and Manuel was aware of a feeling of hope, of growing joy, of many things. Dad Ose felt all this, too, and mistrusted it; it reminded him of nothing so much as a couple of times when he’d been incautious enough to examine Manuel’s mind-paintings. Ana just watched, smiling. The Girl and Zozula sat still, un
derstanding.

  The Quickly trembled, and began to go out of focus. The rainbow flickered.

  The Quickly fell forward, supported by his companions. They turned him and laid him gently on his back, where he died. The rainbow, still incomplete, winked out, leaving a lumpy mass of damp sand and weed. A low moan ran along the beach like the wind, an ululation of loss from a thousand Quicklies. And the two armies flew at each other, and clashed, and the beach was a whirling battleground.

  Manuel turned away and, together with the others, climbed the bank out of harm’s way. For the first time he became fully aware of the newcomers.

  “Oh … hello, Zozula,” he said. “Hello, Girl.”

  Zozula said, “You’re lucky, Manuel. All we humans are. We have time — time to finish what we begin.”

  And Manuel looked at Ana. Dad Ose would always remember that, looking on it as one more hurt to remember through the years to come, never knowing how much history hinged on Manuel’s looking at Ana.

  She said, “Come with us, Manuel.”

  THE VOYAGE WITHOUT AN END

  Dad Ose had gone back to his church.

  The Triad sat in Ana’s cave and Ana leaned in her usual position, elbows and breasts resting on the counter. Manuel was tired, yet excited at the same time because of what Zozula had said to him. The Girl dozed, exhausted.

  Zozula had said, “I think I know where Belinda is, Manuel. Caradoc is beginning to understand how to reach some of the old memories in the Rainbow, and it seems there are people out there at sea. But the islands they live on — they float. That’s why we couldn’t find them on the old charts. They move about with the currents. Caradoc showed us. We saw people with slim bodies — True Humans.”

  “Did you see Belinda?”

  “No — we were viewing some kind of historical scene. But I’m sure she’s there.”